Volunteers as Boundary Workers: Negotiating Tensions Between Volunteerism and Professionalism in Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

This article employs a boundary work framework to analyze how volunteers from two nonprofit human services organizations navigated the tensions between volunteerism and professionalism. Based on interview data and analysis of organizational documents, the study found that volunteers at the first organization, fundraisers for child health promotion and parent education, dichotomized volunteerism and professionalism as incompatible social systems with divergent objectives, practices, and tools. Volunteers at the second organization, which provides emergency ambulance services, engaged in constant boundary crossing, oscillating between a volunteer and professional approach to tasks and relationships depending on the context. In both cases, paid staff and members of the public affected participants' ability to engage in boundary work. The study offers insights for nonprofit organizations wishing to professionalize their volunteer workforce by specifying how volunteer job types, organizational structure, and interactional partners' feedback impact volunteers' ability to engage in boundary crossing, passing, and boundary spanning.

Inside “Pandora’s Box” of Solidarity: Conflicts Between Paid Staff and Volunteers in the Non-profit Sector

“…Governments' policies, which nowadays rely on NPOs to provide basic social services to community (Henriksen et al, 2012), are setting proceedings to identify and finance the most effective NPOs (Salamon, 2015). This promotes the implementation of new procedures to maximize their productivity and adjust their methods to their applications' requirements (Berzin and Camarena, 2018;McAllum, 2018). These administrative procedures usually must be assumed by paid staff, as they require a constant supervision that cannot be guaranteed by volunteers, who usually have a very flexible work schedule as most of them have a remunerated job position elsewhere (Ariza-Montes et al, 2015, 2017.…”

“…Indeed, those conflicts are not clearly defined in the non-profit research based on established conflict typologies, so their prevention and management area challenge both parties and organizations. These conflicts have been described in terms of "difficulties" between volunteers and paid staff due to their different roles in the organization (Kreutzer and Jäger, 2011;McAllum, 2018). While the causes of these difficulties and the cognitive mechanisms involved have not been analyzed from the framework of grounded theories, their relevance and negative impact on job satisfaction have been widely confirmed (Netting et al, 2008).…”

“…According to this author, these situations can be triggered by (a) parties' characteristics (their values and motivations, aspirations, and objectives); (b) their prior relations (including expectations); (c) the nature of the issue rising the conflict or the social environment in which the conflicts take place; (d) their strategy managing them; and (e) conflict consequences. It has been pointed out that in NPOs, conflicts arise particularly due to unclear boundaries between the main roles in the organization (McAllum, 2018), definitively two different and changing organizational identities with different ways of doing their jobs. This complex interaction between paid staff and volunteers will lead to different types of conflicts, depending on the nature of the issues at stake.…”

Theorizing Hybrid Models of Peer Production: A Case Study of an Open Collaborative Journalism Platform

“…internal and external knowledge flows with both inside-out and outside-in open innovation strategies [12,21]). Thus, WikiTribune's organization includes both professionalism and volunteerism, which both have a distinctive way for controlling and organizing work and its workers [17].…”

“…WikiTribune, in its own words "takes professional, standards-based journalism and incorporates the radical idea from the world of Wiki that a community of volunteers can and will reliably protect and improve articles" 1 . As a result, tensions may exist between volunteerism and professionalism that may influence the project and its development and the way volunteers and staff participate [17]. This unique element adds further complexity to a model of production that has transformed society and the economy [3].…”